In many cases, the end of the year gives you time to step back and take stock of the last 12 months. This is when many of us take a hard look at what worked and what did not, complete performance reviews, and formulate plans for the coming year. For me, it is all of those things plus a time when I u...

Cloud computing figures prominently in recently released Gartner report entitled "CIO New Year’s Resolutions, 2009." Gartner’s overall advice to the CIO is to do what is necessary to survive in ‘09, but to be sure to also invest in the future by building and preparing for what lies beyond.

In a report issued Monday entitled CIO New Year’s Resolutions, 2009 (subscription required), Gartner analysts Mark Raskino, John Mahoney and Patrick Meehan outline 10 tactics that will help CIO’s “survive in 2009,” and put them “ahead of the crowd.”

Given the state of the global economy, and the fear, uncertainty and doubt this creates for CIOs and IT organizations in general, this year’s set of resolutions takes a very future-oriented tack: Gartner’s advice to the CIO is to do what is necessary to survive in ‘09, but to be sure to also invest in the future by building and preparing for what lies beyond. One key finding of the report… “It's time to prepare yourself for what comes next — this recession is already a year old.”

“You will need to start leading your organization safely in this inevitable direction, or risk being sidelined by its progress”

CIOs are encouraged to immerse themselves (albeit only for a day) in the issues, terms and trends of cloud; test-drive different cloud (SaaS) applications; identify

areas in their portfolio that are already helping to explore the cloud landscape; spin up a cloud app development project in ‘09; and start to assess the cost of internal applications of a utility (per-seat, per-month) basis. Later in the report they are encouraged to experiment with EC2-style cloud development.

All in all, I think this is great advice for CIOs, but I think Gartner isn’t pushing them to be aggressive enough. Cloud represents a fundamental shift in “the way of doing things,” and is about more than just SaaS. Many CIOs will benefit from a deeper look into the cloud stack, i.e. at the platform and infrastructure layers as well.

How do you think cloud computing should figure into a CIO’s resolutions for 2009? Let me know here.

[This appeared originally here and is republished in full by kind permsission of the author, who retains copyright.]

About Samuel CharringtonSamuel Charrington is VP of Product Management & Marketing at Appistry. Formerly, he was an early employee at Plumtree Software, where he made pivotal contributions in a variety of sales and marketing roles as the company grew from pre-revenue to over $80 million in annual income. Most recently, as Director of Business Development, he was responsible for defining and executing the company's technology partnering strategy. Previously, Charrington held sales and marketing positions in AT&T's Business Multimedia Systems organization.

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